Creating telephone answering systems can be fun as I discovered at History Hack Day when I put together the Huffduffer hotline using the Tropo API. There’s something thrilling about using the human voice as an interface on your loosely joined small pieces. Navigating by literally talking to a machine feels simultaneously retro and sci-fi.

I think there’s a lot of potential for some fun services in this area. What a shame then that the technology has mostly been used for dreary customer service narratives:

Horrific glimpse of a broken future. I sniffed while a voice activated phone menu was being read out and it started from the beginning again.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about injecting personality into web design, often through the tone of voice in the microcopy. When personality is conveyed in the spoken as well as the written word, the effect is even more striking.

What happens when Customer Service bots start getting too smart? What if they start needing help too? How would they use the tools at their disposal to reach out to those they care about? What if they start caring about us a little too much?